John Connolly - Bad Men

There was movement there. Carl was sure of it.

“Hey, you down there! Come out, now. I can see you. No point in hiding.”

The figure retreated back into the shadows beneath the steps.

“Come on, now,” Carl repeated. He tried to catch a glimpse of the shape through the slats of the stairs. “I won’t hurt you, but you’re making me real nervous. Come out or I don’t know what I might do.”

Carl moved down two more steps, and the basement door slammed closed behind him. He turned, and felt his feet slide out from under him. For a moment, he teetered on the very edge of the step, then his balance failed him and he tumbled down the remaining stairs.

As he fell, his thought was: Hands. I felt hands on my legs.

Scarfe stared hard at Dexter but kept his mouth closed until the big man spoke to him.

“You got something to say?” asked Dexter.

“We could have taken him alive.”

“You think? I could barely see the fucking guy to take the shot. If I hadn’t taken it, we’d have lost him.”

“You didn’t have to kill him.”

Dexter looked to Moloch to intervene, but Moloch was already moving past them, following the road as it sloped down, the road at his right and the sound of the sea to his left.

“Listen,” said Dexter to Scarfe. “I got six more arrows. You keep fucking with me and one of them might just have your name on it.”

“You’re forgetting something.”

“What’s that?”

Scarfe was red with cold and righteous indignation. It made him forget how much Dexter frightened him. “I’m not a dummy running away from you,” he said. “You’ll find me a little harder to kill.”

Dexter sprang for Scarfe, but the smaller man was too fast for him. He slipped past Dexter, drawing his gun as he did so. Within seconds, Dexter was staring down the barrel of the Glock. The gun was shaking in Scarfe’s hand.

“You done fucked up now,” said Dexter.

“You’re the one with a gun aimed at him.”

“Then you better use it, pussy boy, or else I’m going to kill you.”

Scarfe heard movement behind him, and the sound of a hammer cocking.

“Let it go,” said Moloch. “Both of you, let it go.”

Scarfe lowered his gun. Dexter made a move for him, but Powell reached out and held him back by extending his forearm in front of his chest.

“I won’t forget that,” said Dexter.

Scarfe, his burst of adrenaline receding, backed away. Shepherd, who had stayed quiet throughout, followed Moloch to the edge of the forest.

“He should be here,” he said. “Lubey should be here.”

“It’s the weather,” said Moloch. “It’s just delayed him.”

He called to Scarfe, but Scarfe wasn’t looking at him. Instead, he was staring down at the sea below.

“Hey,” he said softly, yet there was something in his tone that made Moloch and the others approach him, even causing Dexter to forget his animosity in order to follow his gaze.

“Hey,” repeated Scarfe. “The guy, he’s still alive.”

Carl Lubey lay on his back among the newspapers and the fallen boxes, slowly coming to. His head ached. He didn’t know how long he had been out, but he guessed it had been no more than a minute or two. There was light coming from somewhere close by, and an acrid smell.

Burning.

He turned his head and saw the flames licking at the newspapers beneath the basement stairs. Carl tried to raise himself, but there was a weight across his chest and he couldn’t feel his legs. He reached out and encountered no obstacle, merely a coldness in the air that chilled his fingers despite the growing heat. The flames were licking against the back wall, devouring paper and clothing and old suitcases. Soon they would reach the shelves of paints and spirits.

Carl saw more flames flicker in the darkness to his left. He couldn’t figure out how the fire had spread over there, because it was as far away as you could get from the conflagration over by the far wall, yet he could clearly discern flares of light close to the floor. They were slowly moving toward him, but they weren’t increasing in size and he could feel no warmth. Instead, they seemed to hang in midair, like sparks carried on a breeze.

And suddenly Carl understood that what he was looking at was not fire but the reflection of fire, caught in shards of mirror that were now drawing closer and closer to him, the smell of dead fish and rotting seaweed growing stronger, filling his nostrils with the stench of decay. A woman’s ruined face emerged from the shadows and Carl opened his mouth as the flames reached the paint and turpentine on the shelves, and his final agony was lost in a great roar.

Dupree leaned back in his chair and stretched. Chair and bones alike made cracking noises, so he stopped in midextension and carefully eased himself back toward the desk. If he broke the chair, he would have to requisition another and that would mean dealing with the jibes, because the wiseasses in supplies would assume-correctly-that his great bulk had taken out the item of furniture in question. In the end, it would be easier for everyone if he just bought his own damn chair.

He checked his watch and shuffled his completed paperwork to one side of the desk. None of it had been very urgent, but he had allowed untyped reports to pile up these last few weeks and the blizzard had given him an excuse to remain at the station house and catch up on the mundane details of speeding offenses, DUIs, and minor fender benders. The reports had also allowed him to forget, for a while, his worries about the island. The time spent immersed in the routines of day-to-day life had enabled him to put those concerns into perspective. When Macy returned, he would take a drive over to Marianne’s house and make sure she was okay. He wanted to know why she had been in such a rush to get back to Portland, and enough time had elapsed since the arrival of the water taxi to make it look as if he wasn’t checking up on her too closely. It might have been something to do with Danny, but if Danny was really sick, then Marianne would have been in touch with him to arrange emergency transportation. All in all, it was a puzzler.

He heard the main station door open and footsteps in the reception area. Dupree had asked headquarters to consider putting in a counter to section off the office from the public area, but so far nothing had been done. It wasn’t a big deal at this time of year, but during the summer, when the incidence of petty thefts, lost children, and stolen bicycles took a sudden sharp rise, there could be up to a half dozen people crowding around the office door.

He left his desk and stepped out into reception. To his right, a pretty black woman with an Afro was running the fingers of her left hand along the side of Engine 14. She wore a hooded waterproof jacket and blue jeans tucked into shin-high boots. The fake fur lining of her hood was spangled with melting snow.

“Can I help you, ma’am?”

The woman looked at him, and her eyes widened.

“My, aren’t you the big one?” said Leonie.

Dupree didn’t react. “Like I said, can I help you with something, ma’am?”

“Sure, baby, you can help me,” she said. She turned away from the engine and he saw the silenced pistol in her hand. “You can help me by taking the thumb and middle finger of your left hand and lifting that gun from your holster. You think you can do that?”

Dupree caught movement to her right as a man appeared from the shadows behind the fire trucks. He was redhaired and wrapped up tightly against the cold in a padded blue coat, but Dupree could see that he was a big man even without the padding. He too had a gun in his hand, the silencer like a swollen tumor at its muzzle, and it was also pointing in Dupree’s direction.